Oriah and Violet—I’m not sure if you’ll read this but since I can’t reply to Amazon reviews directly (once upon a time I gather authors were able to, and it was a real show,) I just want to thank you (and everyone else) for your wonderful comments and support. It truly is wonderful. It’s a long reply and I go off on a tangent, so just a little forewarning (as in I won’t be offended if you skip reading this lol.) I also took a muscle reliever last night after having cleaned up my yard and spending hours cleaning out canes under a rose bush. So yeah, things are not quite tracking today.
To answer Violet’s kind review:
“Amazingly beautiful book. Crazy low price. Buy it.
I haven’t colored in this book yet because it’s just too gorgeous the way it is, and I don’t want to ruin it. Perhaps I’ll purchase an additional copy, and one book will be full of ‘happy accidents’ and highly questionable color combinations, and the second book with be full of my perfect masterpieces (lol…I wish).
I love the single-sided pictures, and I love the substantial black paper. I could gush about this book all day, but in short, I’ll recommend that you buy this coloring book as a gift to yourself…now. You won’t regret it.
Hello Charlie…this is Volume I. Please say that we can expect several more volumes as luscious as this one!”
To answer your last question first, yes. I have enough images and concepts for two more books that I had reserved, all of which still need to be vetted and revisited. I also might be able to recombine some of the elements from all of them to add variation. When I released this first volume, I left a lot of images on the cutting floor for at least a second volume to be just as interesting.
As for when, that’s an increasingly common question people have been asking. Things are pretty hectic right now and I have some non-coloring book things I need to tend to as the warm weather has finally arrived. Things like gardening, window installation, and finishing a new studio workspace on top of spending time with my kids. I’m trying to juggle all of this, weather-permitting. Add to that, I keep encountering unbelievable stuff with Amazon screwing things up (which I still have more to post shortly—these posts also help with search engine visibility so that’s also why I’m partially wordy.) So I would aim for early summer of 2024.
***WARNING YOUR LAST CHANCE TO GET OFF THIS ADHD BOAT. LEAVING PORT AND NOT COMING BACK: this is the part in which I’d recommend you or most other people stop reading. Because as much as I hate the length of The Atlantic articles, I’ve become the very wordy beast I have sought to contain. Don’t say that I didn’t warn you.***
I’ve also been working behind the scenes on a bunch of other concepts, some of which gets abandoned and others that I find interesting, but realizing that others may not. The Art Nouveau Book concept was something I was always leading up to from the start, and it appears to have struck just the right chord with people. The other books are just as good—especially The Amazing Animal Coloring Book title but the Art Nouveau title tends to lead the pack by a wide margin.
The overall series was intended to showcase different styles. I realized early on that with so many images being left over, that this would easily become a couple of volumes. There are two more books that were meant to complete the whole series—Amazon KDP limits series to six books in total. I was hoping to get the next title, a book on stained glass available soon. After that, I was toying around with releasing botanical art/floral prints, a coloring book on robots, architecture as that’s been most of my career (particularly in the style of traditional Japanese or craftsman,) or even something more in the artistic style of Audubon. I tried coming up with an Art Deco style, but just can’t seem to get that one to work. I haven’t given up, but it’s not a high priority.
***In proofreading this over again, here’s where my mind really starts to unravel.***
As for price, it is extremely low but the books are still relatively new and I’m up against coloring book veterans (I call the coloring book mafia,) some of which have dozens and even hundreds of titles to their name. Eventually I plan on raising all of the titles to an average price, perhaps even slightly higher. At $4.99, I earn about .17¢ per sale (Amazon covers manufacturing costs, shipping, and then splits and proceeds 60/40) and since I’m running ads, I’m essentially giving these away for free. I don’t know how Amazon, (who also prints these books) manages to keep the costs of paper, ink, and shipping this low but it’s pretty incredible.
With the current price, I hope to secure a higher position on Amazon and that this will lead to more reviews. I’m just fortunate to be in the current position. I firmly believe at a higher price, people would still be very happy with their purchase, but currently the sales will drop and that’s just a death sentence. Just recently, I tried raising the price by $3 to an average sale price of $7.99 while keeping my ads the same. The position, or BSR (Best Sellers Rank) on Amazon started to plummet which told me that the low price was critical. So prices are now temporarily set back to where they were.
The one thing these books are missing are the reviews compared to almost all of the titles above and below The Art Nouveau Coloring Book: Hats, Cats, & Vintage Romance. And this is probably the last key in my puzzle which is missing. So reviews such as yours are invaluable. When I say that I appreciate it, I truly mean it both from knowing that you enjoy these titles, but it also will hopefully help secure a more solid position on Amazon.
***Now this is where my mind has become a pet bobcat playing with a loose thread from a nice sweater while someone else is wearing it.***
Some of these other titles on the site have hundreds and even tens of thousands of reviews which frankly-speaking, isn’t natural. I only receive around 1 review per ~100 to 200 sales (I’m still new but this has been my experience so far, and arguably very few people ever get to this position) to give you an idea as to how difficult those reviews are to obtain. Currently I stand at about 25 reviews. So any coloring book receiving 10,000 reviews (or even 20,000) within a couple years just seems like a gigantic red flag. It just doesn’t make sense and I don’t know how they miss it. How can any book aside from a NYT best seller receive so many, and more importantly “why?” That many written reviews just get lost in the shuffle.
Keep in mind, Amazon reviews do not AFAIK count towards a product or book’s overall ranking. It’s solely a somewhat inaccurate generalization as to what the audience thinks. That however can influence someone looking at a product to make a somewhat informed decision as to whether or not they want to buy that product, which in turn DOES impact a product’s overall ranking.
So while Amazon recognizes fraudulent reviews and is taking additional steps to combat them (it’s in everyone’s best interest including their own due to potential returns,) they still seem completely oblivious to many of the ones in the top spots that are still out there or they are willfully ignoring the issue, which is not the first time I’m seeing this (just read my other posts here.) It’s forcing tens of thousands of artists to struggle while trying to play an impossible game of catching up with these artificially-inflated numbers. The whole thing is a house of cards, but they owe it to everyone to take a closer look at those artificially inflated statistics.
They could start by simply stripping out all non-verified reviews. While I myself have left unverified reviews on products (ie. buying a useful tool elsewhere,) it would at least help reset the playing field. But as you all know, that would be too easy and would make way too much sense to even care about.
OR, Amazon could separate the non-verified from the verified reviews so that it’s more obvious and not count the unverified reviews along with the verified ones. Which of course, that would make total freakin’ sense but for some odd reason, someone at the company is far too lazy to figure something so obvious like this one out or to direct their subordinates to actually get off their lazy butts and actually do something about it. It’s not like it’s that freakin’ hard.
“Hey Bob.”
“Yes, boss?”
“Fix this shit or you’re fired.”
“On it.”
If Amazon is monitoring this article, and I’m sure that they are due to my recent issues with them and my more recent connection to Jane Friedman’s blog and others, I would like to make another proposal in addition to the ones you recently implemented from me (you’re welcome by the way—I bet top brass is seeing the savings and less hassle from implementing those copyright reporting measures. I hate to be like this but I told you so…)
Start by trying to estimate how quickly most items receive reviews end up in a higher position to a cut-off point. This will paint a picture when compared to previous historical data of other items that have purchases. This will only work if you consider verified purchases only (aka proven data.)
Count the quantity of reviews over time coming from newer titles that have increased rather rapidly in BSR such as mine. Give it a short time frame. This would resemble plotting BSR, time from release, item category, amount of competitors with similar items, and review count along with review quality. You don’t have to have all of this information, but the more granular data you include, the more accurate the results.
Now go back in history—I’m sure you keep historical records in your AWS buckets somewhere (even I have access to historical stats for products) and plot the velocity of some of these much higher-inflated titles and reviews to see if their review velocity (verified reviews only) follows an average exponential trajectory.
I wouldn’t say it’s the easiest, but it’s also not that difficult seeing that you have some of the world’s most powerful AI and GPU farms at your disposal already. Also, you can afford some of the brightest minds to implement a procedure such as this so please hop on it.
Anyways, that was a massive tangent on my behalf so if you made it this far, congratulations? Sorry? Not sorry? Also, thank you? Please leave more honest reviews? Buy more books? I’m cheap. I’m easy. Ready to be. And Amazon, can you please fix your?
Still here? Shhh. You’ve discovered my secret lair. Some jack is going to accuse me of using AI to write all of this. Happens every single time and has become really annoying. Because people can be total assumptive idiots. I bet their eyes are darting backwards and forwards and up and down, looking for the slightest of clues. Same people that think the moon landing was a Hollywood movie set. Which I suppose is half of everyone so maybe I should keep my mouth shut. And for the record, I actually tried running this through ChatGPT and it turned it into an unrecognizable hot mess of something far more easier to digest, while stripping out all of the points I wanted to make. But yeah. People still aren’t capable of entirely deciphering their new realities…
